[Trombone-l] Home Valve Cleaning

[Doug Rowe]

Hello,

A quick question:

My Conn 88H valve gets a bit sticky on occasion.  Flooding the valve with
oil (I'm using Binak Pro) via the tuning slide and slide receiver helps
sometimes, but also has a tendency toward gumming up the slide if/when the
oil dribbles its way down and mixes with my slide cream.  I avoid similar
issues on my Edwards bass by disassembling, cleaning, and oiling the valves
(thus avoiding have to pour anything into the tuning slide) semi regularly
(four times a year or so).

Disassembling the Thayers is easy.  I'm not as sure about the traditional
rotor, though.  Does anyone else (non trained repair-person) do this at
home?  Is there any website detailing what to pull/pry/push in order to
disassemble a traditional valve?  Or am I taking a really big risk and
SHOULD just leave it to a repair person (I'm not opposed to repair people,
but there is an inconvenience factor since the nearest repair folk are about
40 miles away).

On or off list replies are fine.  If someone knows of a thread in which this
has been covered I'd be happy to have a pointer to that, as I was unable to
find anything in the available archives.

Thanks,
Doug